Tuesday, December 2, 2014

In an age where
the author has become just another marketing tool whose name is of greater
importance than what they might have to say (perhaps a sign that ‘we’ value not
so much the content of a book as the brand itself; moreover, that too few
writers actually have anything worth saying and are therefore capable of little
more than self-aggrandisement), it is refreshing to encounter a publisher such
as gnOme Books whose project is the production of clandestine works by
anonymous writers; and in the case of the unidentified M., it is almost as if a
process of dehumanisation has been required in order that one is again able to
approach the question of what it might entail to be human, to stand naked
rather than be dressed upby corporate profiling, and to turn away from the
absurd cyber-dream of a Singularity so as to accept the irrevocable frailties
and limits of the body:

‘...in stun
light of bled ember embark viscid endless

...marked trace
of scar scar’s out-breath of reach emptier than

...dead spark of
wound collapses headless viper taste attrition.’

So begins this impressive sequence of
prose poems, and what follows evokes the feral shriek of one of Francis Bacon’s
figures whose pitch remains at a nerve-jarring constant throughout while here
and there gritting teeth against a starkly exquisite image: ‘a lung locked
suitcase full of carrion.’ For the most part, however, the tone is one of harsh
alliteration (‘voice no longer rapture closed fist slash breath lack endless
collapse vicious’)or the type of jagged repetition which brings to mind
Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation
(‘of the eye extract it cannot detraced no it not a of the eye’s detract it
cannot be detraced’ or ‘locked bone nothing severed ever nothing none of
nothing less than none that is or of the naught said without’).Elsewhere, as in
the second part of the book, ‘It’
sequence, in which abrasive vowels swarm around a nexus of incantatory
permutations, Samuel Beckett is recalled: ‘...it/yes it will/wills/it will eat
you alive/wills not/it has or does not it will and can/it will cease/resent/it
returns it will forever be/yet no/never was given the benefit of lack/in the
redeem still it exists yet spitsblood from a mouth full of broken teeth.’

Eden,
Eden, Eden by Pierre Guyotat, Kenji Siratori’sBlood Electric, the post-Poems
output of J. H. Prynne, the early novellas of Kathy Acker, the almost
untranslatable final poems of Paul Celan, and the dissident texts of the
original L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement are all conceivable referents, but the
sequence itself directs the reader to Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, and,
indeed, Francis Bacon. It is interesting to note that in speaking of his
portraits, many of which inspired nausea and loathing in their subjects when
they were at last revealed, Bacon related something to the effect that he found
it necessary to distort the image in order to bring it back to reality.
Likewise, there are moments in Un-Sight/Un-Sound
where it seems as if the hold language has over our perceptions is being,
if not broken, then at least distorted enough for us to catch a glimpse of the
world that lies behind our makeshift descriptions and definitions - ‘the dogs
devour the tears shed as of skin sanguine in lapse of momentary lack of resolve
cast out into negate of the redempt’: redemption here is denied, for without
the Christian belief in the fall of mankind there is nothing for humans to be
redeemed from, that is, we are no longer strangers thrown into the world but
only an ephemeral contingency of it.

Nonetheless, for all its dissonance and
fragmentation the sequence cannot help but now and then assemble itself into an
almost melodious refrain (‘sound simulations gripped by breathless/soon to
dissipate/songs of un-being/traceless violet songs in bloom/distillate to point
of never having been/all purpose shredded/white lung till breakage’), as if
some kind of tenuous equilibrium is straining to be recognised amidst the
chaos, even though, as the reader is reminded, where by chance it appears, this
harmony is ‘soon to dissipate.’ Yet the fact that this brief intercession of
musicality appears to arise by accident rather than by design somehow makes it
all the more fragile and beautiful.In its condensed form, the passage mirrors
the Japanese haiku poet Issa, who wrote: ‘Never forget:/we walk on hell,/gazing
at flowers.’

Appropriately enough, the sequence ends in
a squall of disjointed ‘shards,’ after which we ought really to be rendered
mute to appraise it. After all, to search for meaning or reason, while among
the strongest of human impulses, is to neglect the possibility that life is there
simply to be experienced, nothing more. So, too, is this book to be
experienced, for like the human organism itself, it seems to have no core, no
cohesion; rather it is composed of strata and detritus, bits and pieces that by
the purposeless drift of evolution happen to work together while forever
exhibiting a tendency towards disintegration: ‘...the naught cancels all,’ runs
one particularly exceptional passage, ‘glimmer hope and I/else the retraced
footsteps seeking outward step/words drained in dissipate/sands blown across
erasing the tidal of...’